San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tension growing in Tahoe
Outbreak pits locals against outoftowners
TRUCKEE — The coronavirus pandemic at first seemed impossibly distant to residents of the hamlets ringing Lake Tahoe.
It was winter, and snowdrifts pillowed the Sierra Nevada. The novel virus seemed to be contained to urban places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, or as far removed as Wuhan, China. Besides, people in this mountain town are hardy — the type used to hunkering down.
“I think there was a bit of hope and thinking that, ‘Oh, we’re our own little place, and it’ll never get here, and we’ll be fine,’ ” said Truckee Mayor Dave Polivy, 42.
That wasn’t the case.
As the ski resorts closed in midMarch — in spite of a blizzard — and residents were told to shelter in place, eastern Nevada County became a hot spot. Despite having only 20% of the county’s population of 99,755, the eastern side saw up to 80% of the coronavirus cases. As of Thursday, 36 residents have tested positive; of them, 24 live near the eastern
border. So did the county’s only victim, an 81yearold woman who died in Truckee in early April.
The pandemic has left the 16,500person town with an infection rate seven to 10 times higher than the rest of California, threatening to overrun its only hospital. The Tahoe Forest Health System, with its six ICU beds and nine ventilators, serves several counties in two states. It cannot handle the brunt of the pandemic.
Struggling to contain the outbreak before it overruns them, Truckee’s leaders have asked secondhome owners and tourists to stay away until Gov. Gavin Newsom lifts shelterinplace orders.
But not everyone has listened.
Pristine Lake Tahoe — at 22 miles long and 12 miles wide — laps five counties in California and Nevada, and each has grappled with the pandemic in slightly different ways. Both El Dorado County and Nevada County, which includes Truckee, banned shortterm rentals and hotels from serving nonessential workers. Placer County dispatched 15,000 letters this month to secondhome owners along the lake, asking them to stay put at their primary residence.
Placer County Public Health Officer Dr. Aimee Sission ordered the letter sent. “Should that person become ill while residing in their second home in North Lake Tahoe, they would potentially be going to receive care at a hospital that was already at capacity, if not operating over capacity,” she explained. “They think they’re somehow going to a safe haven, but they’re not.”
But such bans have not been enough to deter all visitors — and they’ve fanned longstanding tensions between fulltime locals and parttime residents. Prepandemic, the issues were housing prices and the cost of living, pushed up, locals would say, by the parttimers from the west. Now, it’s about who has a right to stay at all.
On April 10, an email with information about Truckee’s stayathome advisory began circulating among members of the Serene Lakes Property Owners Association, a group of lot and cabin owners in the Donner Summit area, among them secondhome owners. Some bristled at the new regulations.
“Thanks for passing along this ridiculous suggestion/ recommendation,” one member wrote back in an unsigned email. “Bay Area hospitals are just as overwhelmed as hospitals in small towns. Oh yea, and we pay taxes here. Ironic how 50% of homes in Truckee area are 2nd homes yet county supervisors bite the hands that feed them.”
The email continued: “We’re supposed to ‘support the community’ when it’s convenient for the locals (who are mostly transplants from other states etc) and stay away when it’s not? ‘We’re all in this together!’ …. Until it affects me, then you’re on your own.’ ”
Such attitudes are part of the problem, said Harry Weiss, the CEO of Tahoe Forest Health System, which has campuses in Truckee and Incline Village. The system is one of California’s 34 Critical Access Hospitals, defined as more than 35 miles away from another hospital and equipped with 25 acute care inpatient beds or less. Located in rural, secluded corners of the state — others are in Yreka, Healdsburg and Fort Bragg — these hospitals have by definition fewer resources than their urban counterparts. They were never built to handle the full force of a pandemic.
The Tahoe Forest Health System covers an area spanning about 3,500 square miles, including some of the country’s premier ski slopes. Weiss said that’s probably where the coronavirus spread, arriving with tourists from Sacramento and the Bay Area in early March. Lake Tahoe can see its population balloon from 14,000 to 140,000 in a single weekend.
“We took off like a rocket,” Weiss said, recalling the early weeks of the pandemic. “This has been a really hot area. Many of the first patients that tested positive weren’t fulltime residents.”
In fact, the impact of those from outside the region is difficult to measure. Those cases aren’t included in Nevada County’s count; test results are registered in a patient’s home county, not where they were swabbed. Weiss maintains that the region’s medical facilities aren’t set up to handle them — especially not the additional demands presented by patients breathing the thin mountain air at 6,000 feet while in respiratory distress.
“We don’t want to overwhelm rural health resources when there are at least 100 hospitals near and around San Francisco and Los Angeles, with more than 300 in the state total,” Weiss said.
With a primary residence elsewhere, those parttimers have the option of seeking medical care in other places. But residents of this small town don’t have that luxury.
Many Truckee residents are watching how other communities are coping, and are frustrated that their community hasn’t been more proactive.
They see Mammoth Lakes, a ski destination in Mono County where the town voted to install a highway checkpoint on the main road to insure that only residents and those with essential business were allowed to enter. They point to South Lake Tahoe, where the Town Council voted in early April to issue $1,000 citations to anyone violating the state’s shelterinplace order, and where the interim police chief has promised that his officers will regularly check the 1,400 vacation rentals, calling the owners if the property is occupied and possibly fining them.